Where is the need

Managers of small and medium-size businesses face many of the same challenges as in large enterprises, but don’t have the same resources to deploy when exercising control, especially when facing unexpected obstacles. The IT department of an SMB is almost always small, consisting of a handful of professionals tasked with huge responsibility and large workload. The challenge of building an effective IT environment for a small business is that it is both expensive and complex. Corporate managers need to wear an extra hat – ‘information specialist’ – in order to make the right decisions. This creates a Catch-22. You need to improve revenue in order to be able to afford specialist staff, but you can’t afford them before the investment yields the necessary efficiencies and savings.

Many mid-sized companies can’t justify the expense of a full-time SQL database administrator – that’s why Ryltech can now offer you Managed Services to act as a virtual solution to complement your internal IT team’s need for SQL expertise to help improve processing and implement best practices for your information management.

What Managed Services offers

Most mid-market IT departments are staffed with at least one person who has some basic SQL knowledge, but not the expertise to program, configure and keep up with the latest best practices and recommendations.

For SMB management, Managed Services is a clear solution to the problem of lack of highly skilled database administrators. Whether on a temporary or permanent basis, a managed services agreement grants you access to top-tier trained professionals to monitor your resources and advise on best practices. In this way, in running your SMB, you can deploy a sophisticated SaaS solution, reap all the benefits, pay for it using immediate savings rather than capital, and then concentrate on what you need do best – manage the whole enterprise.

Ryltech’s advantages

From the beginning, Ryltech offers Microsoft SQL Server assessments to ensure your environment is optimally performing. Our actions follow best practice recommendations, resolve all SQL Server performance issues, improve reliability, cut costs and consolidate applications. The advantage Ryltech can offer over competing managed service offerings is that our functionality is built on the most technically advanced SQL Server monitoring application that is available today – AimBetter.

As part of our service, we evaluate all aspects of your SQL Server environment as well as the whole Windows server structure. We monitor SQL performance at the same time as we inspect and assess infrastructure health. AimBetter works by measuring more than 400 individual metrics across the whole spectrum of application and environment. Its fundamental advantage is that it raises attention to all issues without the need for us to wade through vast quantities of irrelevant data. On one dashboard, we can see and pursue every issue that alerts us to conditions requiring attention.

Actions and reactions

Ryltech employs a team of dedicated database administration specialists, so we add strength exactly where your own internal support team needs it, providing IT leadership to assist with strategic planning and helping to create a road-map for future growth, hardware consolidation and upgrades. We can identify and document risks and present remediation plans in accordance with best practices. Finally we make recommendations for maintenance plans and schedules, consolidation and disaster recovery.

In addition to an initial SQL Server assessment covering your existing structure, Ryltech also offers our regular Virtual DBA Services. Since information is essential to your company’s productivity, efficiency and growth and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes and emerging technologies, our serves act in a tactical IT services role, which includes the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance activities for a fixed monthly fee. The service includes a daily SQL Server review using AimBetter, with notification of all exceptions, alerts and performance issues. In cooperation with your IT support personnel, we will recommend what actions are required to head-off all issues.

As well, we issue weekly reviews focusing on performance improvement as well as a comprehensive monthly SQL health report on all actions taken over the past month, together with further suggestions for changes needed to create improvements in performance and stability.

Special services available

Ryltech also offers the following Virtual DBA services billed hourly or through a prepaid retainer:

• Triage of critical errors or warnings
• As needed when agreed by you, installation of software upgrades
• Performing database code review.